Saturday, May 10, 2014

Started this like a month ago, got distracted and busy, and just now made the time to finish. Sso it's not actually current, but I haven't really had time to finish it up . . . really should've waited til life was a bit calmer before trying to start this blog up again.

I don't particularly have time to write a post on any of these ideas, but the cow's stomach that is my brain has been regurgitating and re-chewing on this stuff lately.

Blogger Kirk Miller highlights some of Carl Trueman's rumination's on his essay, "What Can Miserable Christians Sing?" The historic answer (not that anyone cares about that kind of silliness anymore) is: The Psalms. Having shoved aside the psalms in our worship, what have we done? Truman writes:

By excluding the cries of loneliness, dispossession, and desolation from its worship, the church has effectively silenced and excluded the voices of those who are themselves lonely, dispossessed, and desolate, both inside and outside the church. By so doing, it has implicitly endorsed the banal aspirations of consumerism, generated an insipid, trivial and unrealistically triumphalist Christianity, and confirmed its impeccable credentials as a club for the complacent. In the last year, I have asked three very different evangelical audiences what miserable Christians can sing in church. On each occasion my question has elicited uproarious laughter, as if the idea of a broken-hearted, lonely, or despairing Christian was so absurd as to be comical . . .

if Adam is not the first, who subsequently fell into sin, then the work of Christ loses its biblical meaning. If it is not true that all human beings descend from Adam, then the entire history of redemption taught in Scripture unravels. The result is no redemptive history in any credible or coherent sense and so the loss of redemptive history in any meaningful sense.

John Calvin gives us a good rule to follow:

So then, let us remember that whenever mention is made of [Christ's] death alone, we are to understand at the same time what belongs to his resurrection. Also, the same synecdoche applies to the word "resurrection": whenever it is mentioned separately from death, we are to understand it as including what has to do especially with his death.

Inseparability, however, is not indistinguishably. Plainly Paul thinks of Christ's death and the resurrection as different events on the same plane of historical occurrence. The resurrection is not an aspect or component part of the death. Rather, as Calvin's statement itself reflects, each has a meaning of its own, which is suppressed at the risk of seriously distorting Paul's gospel.